Crazy never wins GOP sweepstakes

If you’re a Northeast elite hoping to crack the code on GOP presidential primaries while impressing your friends at Fifth Avenue dinner parties with insightful political prognostications, always remember one simple rule: Crazy never wins.

Story Continued Below

You heard right, my Upper West Side friend. Crazy. Never. Wins.

Despite the crop of nutty right-wing candidates that sprout up in GOP presidential fields every four years, despite the gasps and growls that regularly rise from Manhattan cocktail parties aimed at extremists who are hijacking the Republican Party (in ways that past GOP extremists would never have dreamed of hijacking the party), despite the cries from right-wing radio hosts predicting the rise of Ronald Reagan’s ghost and the nomination of an unelectable candidate, in the end this political chatter always proves to be sound and fury signifying nothing.

A few caveats to my rule: (1) Thank you very much for the invitations to your Manhattan cocktail parties. Anything written in the preceding paragraphs should not be interpreted to suggest that I am not delighted by your company or future invitations to said events; and (2) Reagan was never the right-wing tool that talk show hosts claim.

Reagan governed California during its greatest — and most challenging — decade. Running a state of that size required him to compromise on abortion, tax increases and the growth of government in a way that offended the John Birch Society.

Reagan ignored the most extreme elements in his party and governed from the center when compromise was required. That pragmatic streak required the conservative movement’s founder to come to the Gipper’s defense more than once.

William F. Buckley praised Reagan’s pragmatism in a 1967 National Review column that mocked right-wing critics by facetiously asking whether the California governor should “padlock the state treasury and give speeches on the Liberty Amendment.”

Buckley would later criticize George W. Bush’s utopian foreign policy by telling The Wall Street Journal that “conservatism implies a certain submission to reality.”